Transcript
Speaker: Hi everyone! Welcome to Queer Logics, the queer -led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Grace, and I'm here with my usual co -hosts, Alicia. Hello! And Leah. Hi there! Thank you for joining us today. It's high summer where we all are, so let's grab a tall glass of lemonade with some basil fresh from the garden, or a nice botanical iced tea.
Speaker: relax on the porch and listen to the bees because today we're doing another Quick Post episode. We're going to highlight some of the things we've been up to in the world of Tolkien, perhaps play a little catch -up with some of the things happening to queer folks in the wider world. This summer there have been and there will continue to be a number of really cool Tolkien conferences, one of which Leah and Grace have already attended and all three of us will be participating in another coming up. So let's start out with a quick conference report.
Speaker: The first of those conferences that we're going to talk about happened very recently. It was the Tolkien Society's Midsummer Seminar, and the theme was Numenor, the mighty and the frail. Yeah, so I caught two papers of this one -day conference. Since I am on the west coast, I tend to get the short end of the stick with these kinds of conferences that tend to occur in Britain because I'm eight hours behind.
Speaker: So I only caught two, but I am really looking forward to the recordings being posted to the Token Society's YouTube page in the near future. A lot of our friends of the pod and folks that we really love presented. And honestly, pretty much this entire schedule was full of bangers. Like there's kind of not one paper on this schedule that I wasn't looking forward to.
Speaker: The papers that I caught, the first one that I watched was by the Reverend Tom Emanuel. It's entitled, By the Waters of Anduin, We Lay Down and Wept, Exilic Theology in the Alcalabeth. And basically the subject of this paper was linking Elendio and Jeremiah the prophet as authors of a particular text, basically.
Speaker: He quotes, I will read the exilic prophet Jeremiah in conversation with Tolkien's Akalabeth and the figure to whom its authorship is attributed within Tolkien's secondary world, Elendil the Faithful. Jeremiah and the Akalabeth both address the problem of theodicy, the question of how an all -powerful, all -loving God can permit suffering and evil.
Speaker: And basically this paper was really exciting to me because something that I'm kind of always thinking about with regards to thinking about some of the more overtly Christian approaches to Tolkien is this question of the odyssey. Friend of the Pod Cameron and I often talk about how we both agree and also agree with Tom here.
Speaker: that Tolkien's legendarium as a whole can be read as Tolkien's reckoning with theodicy, mythopoetic reckoning with the, quote, irrevocable loss of a communal past and the challenge of living into a hopeful future in a broken world.
Speaker: So that's exciting to me because I am kind of a nerd in that way. I thought that it was a really wonderfully done paper and can't wait to revisit it when the recording is back up. And then the next paper that both Grace and I managed to catch live was by soon to be friend of the pod, Chris Ficaro. It was called, and Numenor went down into the sea, the pleasure of self -dissolution and the masochistic duissance of Westerness.
Speaker: I really love this whole session. This paper was fantastic. It was phenomenal. It was sort of opening up an area of looking at Tolkien studies that I had never considered before. And I was impressed by that. And it was just what a time to be alive, to hear this topic talked about at conference. 100%. Fantastic.
Speaker: Yeah, I never thought that I would hear the phrase, sadomasochism is seriously understudied in Tolkien at a Tolkien society event. I was hooked, basically, once he said that. Basically, the subject of this paper was linking the imagery of specifically the great wave that overtakes Numenor.
Speaker: It links this specific image with a lot of the psycho -spiritual elements of submission and punishment in BDSM contexts. I thought that he gave a really great and thorough foundation for
Speaker: BDSM theory and studies, along with Freudian and feminist theory, for the whole room, which I found thrilling and compelling, but it kind of made some people sort of uncomfortable, as you might guess. But for the most part in the online chat, a lot of people were responding with a lot of enthusiasm and excitement.
Speaker: and were willing to have an open mind and really interested that somebody was talking about this at a Tolkien event. Basically this paper ended with Chris proclaiming that
Speaker: Basically, the Alcala Beth is Daddy Kink and the biggest spanking scene of Arda. I mean, linking this to Aeroluvatar and the translation to sort of like the Allfather and Freudian psychology. And in all honesty, Freudian psychology is not
Speaker: where I would necessarily, you have to look at this in the historical context of psychology and psychological analysis, but it's not where I would necessarily stop. There are a lot of things about Freudian psychology that have been disproven, but if you want to look at sadomasochism as a topic, you can't ignore the foundations to be either proven or disproven as far as what Freud put forward. So this was phenomenal to begin exploring.
Speaker: I have a question about this. Did he actually get into Tolkien's dream of the intellectual wave and how that played into it? Oh yeah, absolutely. That's spicy. And was very frank too about the experiences of people who may perhaps grow up in, you know, Catholic school culture and all of that or a punitive school culture and how that can be internalized.
Speaker: some really serious topics that, you know, a lot of folks did struggle with because it's very intense conversation. In fact, we should have a content warning here in our episode for that, but really fascinating things to consider.
Speaker: Yeah, I thought that it was a really fascinating and exciting paper. And like I said, I think that you'll have to watch it, Alicia. I think that you'll be really, really excited to watch it. And it really made me extra excited for our shameless plug, our upcoming interview that we'll be having with Chris, along with Robin Reed and Stephen Yandel. Yes. And we're going to have a really great conversation with them, I think.
Speaker: And we're also going to definitely have to invite Chris back to talk about BDSM and Tolkien. Oh, can we have him on our Aang Bang episode? Oh my God. Oh my God. Ooh. Oh my God. Yes. Yes, please. Let's do it. I believe he's also done some work on Saruman and the treatment of Saruman.
Speaker: within Tolkien's work, and I would be thrilled to talk with him about that as well. That was another society seminar, I think, possibly the Tolkien and Diversity seminar, if I'm remembering right. There have been some really phenomenal topics of Tolkien Society seminars in the last few years, very exciting things that they're exploring.
Speaker: over there and really, I think, sort of pushing the field forward. Yeah. Their upcoming seminar in winter, their midwinter seminar, is discussing token and religion in the 21st century. So specifically casting their net quite a bit wider than and perhaps previously explored in token studies. Explicitly looking for new perspectives. And they were very frank.
Speaker: in putting that call for papers forward that, you know, this doesn't exclude Christian readings and all of that, but we're looking for new and untread ground in ways that have perhaps been minimized of reading Tolkien in the past. And these are exciting topics.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm really excited for that one. And speaking of Christian readings of Tolkien, I did want to kind of mention really briefly that there is a conference or a summit, I guess, coming up called Interchanging Melodies, Tolkien, Religion, and Beyond. So this summit is being held over three days at the end of July, the 28th through the 30th.
Speaker: and it's being run by Nick Polk, the production manager for Malorn, the Tolkien Society Journal, and Trip Fuller of the Homebrewed Christianity Podcast.
Speaker: These guys held a four week token deep dive course called token heads. And again, friends, Chris Focaro and Tommy Manuel both were guest lecturers and they will actually be guest presenters at this summit coming up. And again, like I have a really big interest in Christianity in terms of history and as a like, you know, sociological sort of phenomenon and
Speaker: It's bearing on our our culture today. So it's it feels a little bit weird for me to be like excited about a ostensibly a pretty progressive and leaning leftwards Christian led summit. But I do have to say that from what I know of Nick and of course of Chris and Tom and the participation of Robin Reed in this upcoming summit,
Speaker: I feel pretty positive and excited for it because their goal in creating this conference was specifically to quote, bring together diverse, a -religious voices to dialogue, lecture, and reflect on Tolkien's theology, his religious outlook, and
Speaker: a religious engagement with Tolkien from scholars and fans. The featured speakers, again including Tom, Chris, and Robin, among others, will engage with topics from Tolkien from atheist, agnostic, and animist perspectives to Tolkien and spiritual direction, which is right up my alley. So if any listeners out there are interested in topics like that, I think that you should definitely check it out.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm assuming Robin's presenting on her. She did a poll for atheist and animus Tolkien readers, and I'm pretty sure that's probably what she's going to be speaking on. She's been working on that for a long time, which was not shade at all, because my God, do I have projects I've been working on.
Speaker: for a similar length of time. But I've seen her present some of that preliminary data and is actually really interesting. It's fascinating. Yeah, I'm really excited to see what she talks about, but I expect that's exactly what she's going to be talking about. And I actually was a part of that poll. So I've been following this project for a while. As was I. There are a lot of things this conference season for us nerds to nerd out about.
Speaker: Yeah, let's see what the Christians are up to. The ones that aren't trying to take over the country and turn it into a fascist authoritarian nightmare. You know, the Christians that don't send me shitty DMs.
Speaker: It is fascinating to me how differently Leah and I approach Christianity, given how similar our backgrounds are. Growing up in the South, going to art school, which you wouldn't think has a big tie to Christianity, but my God, if you take an art history class, it is the history of Jesus.
Speaker: Yeah. Now, now, now. And also Mary. And also Mary. Correct. I'm at this point just like I never want to engage in Christian anything. I go out of my way to avoid people who do Christian work on Tolkien because it's not relevant to what I do work on. Or, you know, just Christians in general on social media, like not obviously not all of them. I feel like I need to walk that back a little bit because I do have some Christian friends.
Speaker: But you know, you know the Christians. Hashtag not all Christians. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't even until I was an adult that I realized that it was possible to be a Christian and to not be a fundamentalist.
Speaker: Yeah, because of where I grew up and having my eyes open to that has been very nice and I'm sure this was at a summit is going to be great and is going to be full of those like reasonable Christians who aren't just marching in some like eight parade with tiki torches.
Speaker: Yeah, I just such a bad taste in my mouth about Christianity in general, man. I mean, 150 % get it, man. For me, I kind of see some of it has to do with kind of like my weird obsessive
Speaker: wanting to understand the far right and the history of Christianity is such a historical influence. For me, a lot of it is re -educating myself about what Christianity actually
Speaker: started from and what it became versus what I was taught and discovering how Christianity taught me what Judaism is all about versus what I've actually learned from being friends with actual Jews.
Speaker: I don't know not to get too weird about it but it's for me it's kind of like an ancestral sort of like untangling and healing for me. It's a lot of me trying to kind of understand like where I've come from in terms of both like my northern European white Christian
Speaker: background and also where I've come from as an American living in a country that is actively under threat of minority, of very dangerously committed Christian dominionists and white supremacists.
Speaker: So yeah, that's why I talk about it a lot. For my part, I am fascinated by the deliberate mistranslations and biases injected into theological teachings, primarily Christian, though, of course, not exclusively. But I find it very interesting when people go back to some of the etymology of different words and the ways they've been translated and mistranslated.
Speaker: Part of that comes from how often I get confronted by, you know, the clobber passages about homosexuality in the Bible and, you know, understanding those and what they actually say as opposed to how they're used helped me parse out as a, you know, late teenager, young 20 something in particular helped me parse out how I wanted to respond to those attacks because they're prevalent.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. And how those mistranslations often have an unconscious, sometimes conscious agenda and particular outcome in mind. Like I said, like the history of the Bible as a assemblage of texts very carefully selected. And revised and things left out. Yeah, and revised.
Speaker: in some cases like destroyed. It's fascinating to me because I guess I'm interested in the sort of the psychology and why people do this and very often it's for pretty nefarious reasons but sometimes they're not totally conscious of their nefariousness.
Speaker: I'm actually going to take this opportunity in talking about how those lenses have shifted and how societal lenses have shifted around this to steer us back to another paper that was presented at that Numenor Midsummer Seminar for the Tolkien Society. And that paper was by a friend of the pod, Mercury Natas. And they presented Seducer Destroyer, Sauron's femme fatale sources and their role in the Numenor narrative.
Speaker: And this was a paper that I got to watch live after Leah had to sign off for a bit. And so I was just absolutely, I was giddy watching this paper. I always enjoy hearing Mercury present. And this was no exception. They went through a lot of the historical and particularly Victorian reframing of the femme fatale narrative and, you know,
Speaker: the characterization of the horror of Babylon and all of this, and then how Tolkien applied these tropes to his narrative, but didn't want to cast them onto a woman, and so places them onto the character of Sauron instead. And the paper is just beautifully presented, beautifully laid out, absolutely phenomenal. And one of the many topics that I want to have Mercury on
Speaker: the podcast to talk about because I'm excited about literally everything that they present on. I cannot wait to catch up with that one. That definitely was one that I've been looking forward to for a hot minute. And every time they've presented has been just really full of great insights and really like fun and exciting and really interesting connections that they make.
Speaker: The final paper of that conference, which I also got to see, was by Clare Moore, and that was about Elmar, the experience of captured women and empires in decline, linking sort of Tolkien's Numenorean Empire to the decline of the Roman Empire in Britain and the arrival of
Speaker: Angles and other tribes and all of that and how those political conflicts end up, in a lot of these cases, women being taken and forcibly married. And, you know, we need another content warning here because forcible marriage is, of course, rape. And this is covered in one of Tolkien's writings about the Second Age. And Elmar is that character who is forcibly married into a different society.
Speaker: in Middle Earth, and then we start to follow the story of her grandson eventually, and Tolkien never finished that story. But frequently when people ask me who my favorite character in all of the legendarium is, and I have so many favorites, I can't pick just one, but the most overlooked favorite character I think is Elmar, and everything that she goes through. She has some very powerful words
Speaker: to speak to her captor in all of that. And so it was a fantastic paper to hear presented.
Speaker: There are a bunch of papers that I want to go back and watch as well. There are there were all kinds of things about, you know, postcolonialism and ethical readings and ecology, the ecology of imperialism, the ecology of the anthropocene. That's the one that I'm like, oh, my God, this is like everything I'm always thinking about. So, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Speaker: And then I believe that the award -winning paper for that conference was S .R. Westvex, I often dream of it, trauma and the memory of the legacy of the downfall of Numenor. And I am incredibly excited to go and watch that paper because just having had a few conversations around that with that researcher, I'm just so excited.
Speaker: to see that. So there's such a great research voice. Oh, yeah, whatever they do. I really believe. Yeah, I'm really excited about that one, too. Yeah. So there are just we are spoiled for choice in being able to go back and watch these as they become available.
Speaker: So that is absolutely fantastic. And that is only one of the amazing conferences happening this summer. And we talked about that summit that is also scheduled for at least at the end of July. I did want to give a brief recap of GIFCon 2023, which is the Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations. This theme was boundaries and margins. It spawned from the
Speaker: Fantasy Masters Program at the University of Glasgow and the Center for Fantasy and the Fantastic at Glasgow. Listeners of the pod may have heard some of these words crop up before because I believe we talked about this when our first guest, Taylor Druggers, was on.
Speaker: But this conference has all kinds of papers and panels, ranging across a broad array of fantastical topics. So there were things from papers about Dungeons and Dragons to critical role, YA fantastical fiction, medieval fiction, the application of post -colonial lenses and gothic lenses, and the analysis of novels from authors like Neil Gaiman, Susannah Clark, N. K. Jemisin, Terry Pratchett, Philip
Speaker: And of course, Darragh Tolkien. Two truly phenomenal papers that were presented about Tolkien that I just want to touch on because they were so wonderful. One was Cameron Bourqueens. How do you solve a problem like Myron?
Speaker: subtitled exploring how Sauron's most marginal name recasts the Lord of the Rings. And this was just absolutely fascinating. I had been remiss in not realizing how recent the discovery of the name Myron for Sauron in Tolkien scholarship was. It happened I think around the time that I was in going between undergrad and graduate school and I just kind of missed it and thought it had been
Speaker: something that was longer known than it was and just a paper that is absolutely brilliantly laid out and just leads us along from point to point and just the finish is just fantastic. I was so excited to be watching this one being presented.
Speaker: We're hoping to bring Cameron on. This is the same Cameron that I was talking about. We're both nerds about PO2C. We hope to bring Cameron on to talk all things Sauron because I feel like she has been doing a ton of amazing work and phenomenal research. A ton of papers centered around Sauron. We'd love to bring her on and talk to her about all that. Yeah.
Speaker: And then the author of the second paper that I want to highlight will be familiar to people who have listened to the last three minutes of the podcast, Mercury Natuses, and its folks are queer, queer marginality and sound family dynamics of the baggons at Bag End. This paper absolutely
Speaker: phenomenal again wonderfully laid out wonderfully structured because of the the timing of this being based in in Glasgow. I was at work when a lot of these presentations were happening and had a special dispensation to put some headphones in and listen
Speaker: to folks presenting. So I have at my desk at work, just some of these quotes jotted down and stuck up that I look at every day, just phenomenal points that Mercury was making. And just a paper that looks at all of the context through a lot of
Speaker: like queer joy. And that's not always the way that we get to look at the world and look at literature and all that. There's sometimes a lot of darker things. There's a lot of queer readings of Sauron, for instance, and I love them and they're amazing. But this paper was just brightness and joy, too, and intentionally so because it's important to have those different aspects in our study.
Speaker: Totally. I have had conversations with them with Mercury about this paper and about the themes that they bring up. They really cemented kind of in my heart how much of a queer icon and how much of, you know, hashtag life goals, Bilbo Baggins as the queer uncle who brings everybody in and makes a family for everyone in his home. How much that really means to me and like how much of a kind of a model for
Speaker: For me, he really is. They do a lot of really lovely work too. This moment of joy is a really special one. Yes. And these are some of the folks too as we're highlighting some of these papers as we've been in conversations with some of these researchers. These are folks who we've been sort of teasing that we want to bring on the podcast and have them share.
Speaker: the research and so we're sort of spilling the beans now like all of the people that we're hoping to have on and have conversations with and you know tease everybody a little bit more until we have everything recorded and set to go out but these are just topics that we've been so excited.
Speaker: about as they're going forward and knowing that this research is happening is just incredibly affirming to me. And then a final note about Gif Khan, our first guest, Taylor Driggers, was chair of several of these offerings, including panels and the keynote address. And the same can be said of Demetra Fimi, who we have, of course, referenced I think nearly every episode of the podcast. We do like her work, so.
Speaker: Yeah, I didn't want to point out really briefly that there is one more conference coming up in the fall. Another sort of Christian focused conference in contrast to the one that we were just recommended.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a little different than what we've been talking about. It's nice to recognize the counterpoints in this field. We're presenting all sides. Fair and balanced. We have no biases.
Speaker: None. So this sort of came on my radar, again, thanks to Dr. Robin Reed on her substack. So this conference happening a little bit later this year in the fall is called A Long -Expected Party, a semi -centennial celebration of Tolkien's life, works, and afterlife.
Speaker: She points out that a press release about this conference appears on a heavily Catholic site, and the press release itself is pretty telling about what we might be able to expect from a conference like this. So the site called Alatea notably folds a few things in their little blur about Tolkien, but the biggest one is definitely his quote, deeply held Catholic faith.
Speaker: I wonder why they did that, but in a statement about the conference itself from the organizer, who is Dr. Ben Reinhard, a professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, which is a Catholic university,
Speaker: The press release notes that this conference is kind of hoped to be a, quote, revival in Tolkien scholarship because some scholars are concerned that Tolkien's works are not receiving enough serious attention from academics. And that 2023 is a significant turning point in Tolkien studies because the generation of scholars that truly knew him is entering retirement.
Speaker: So Robin offers kind of a lot of her own commentary and I feel like this conference is definitely aimed at a certain sort of person and a certain sort of perspective that
Speaker: probably have a problem with a lot of the topics that we just discussed in these other conferences, namely because I think, as they say, they hoped to prompt a new wave of serious scholarship on the great author and his works.
Speaker: And I kind of wonder, where have they been? Because there's been a lot of serious scholarship and serious attention and a lot of really fantastic work being done by young, up -and -coming scholars who aren't Jane Chance, Tom Shippey, and Verlyn Fleger.
Speaker: who have all retired and were kind of like the big three of the establishment of Tolkien Studies as a serious scholarship field. Let me just, Grace, go ahead and jump in because I'm going to get started and I'm not going to stop. Just sip this here iced tea that I have. Yeah, take a big sip. I was not aware that personal acquaintance with an author was required for a serious study.
Speaker: of that individual's work. Also, Karl Hasstetter met Tolkien and he's still fucking working. We best let all of the Shakespeare scholars know so that they can pack up and go home since it's been a few hundred years there. Certainly, we can't study Victorian literature. Everyone's dead.
Speaker: Everybody who's studying Egyptian hieroglyphs and Gilgamesh, cuneiform, just pack it all up. In all fairness, that is a more critical reading of the way that this is presented than perhaps they intended us to read, but oh my goodness.
Speaker: The idea that scholarship is based on a cult of personal knowledge of and personal acquaintance with an individual is just very strange to me. It's hard not to read it as both like really kind of myopic in terms of not being kind of aware of what's going on and kind of asserting that Tolkien's works aren't receiving enough serious attention and we need a new wave of serious scholarship. It's like, again, like, where have you been and what have you been doing? Like, we're over here doing
Speaker: of things. But I mean, I guess I found plenty of people on the internet who like to position themselves as experts in Tolkien who have not read any of that scholarship that is happening, nor would they if you sat them down in a room with all of the papers, because that wouldn't be fun for them. But that's not what's going on in Tolkien scholarship these days.
Speaker: Yeah, it's tough for us to read this call for a particular kind of conference as a particular kind of conference, especially because the organizer who has written on Tolkien, including One Piece for Mythlore quite a long time ago, but he's also written for Imaginative Conservative, which is a far -right Christian online publication and has hosted a couple of other pretty big names of other Tolkien authors and scholars.
Speaker: He has also written most recently in Crisis Magazine, which is a far -right Catholic online publication. And most of what he's written there is specifically about how much he hates Amazon's Rings of Power and how much he hates adaptations in general and sort of
Speaker: how it misses the quote unquote moral vision of Tolkien's work. So it's I don't know. I feel like one fucking talking point. Yeah. Yeah. It's like literally like five essays or something on how much he despises it. And so I don't know. It's hard for me to feel very generous or excited about this conference because it seems like they have a very particular kind of
Speaker: paper and a very particular kind of lens in mind. And I really feel like we joke about how much Tolkien would hate this podcast. I kind of have a feeling that Dr. Ben Reinhard would hate this podcast for a lot of reasons.
Speaker: I mean, the underlying thesis of our entire Tolkien would hate this podcast series is that for all the evidence that there is for what a man several decades dead would think of, you know, the scholarship currently and our work and what we're all doing here, the people who are alive and advancing a very different narrative than what seems to
Speaker: be supported by Tolkien's letters and Tolkien's writings. They are the ones who levy this critique and they are the group who seemed that they would hate these more progressive ideals the most.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm about to jump on a little fucking soapbox. The people who demand that we study Tolkien from a very authorial, intentee perspective, which is what they are shooting for, or at least their version of his authorial intent in this conference.
Speaker: It is a very uniquely Christian way of going about Tolkien scholarship, and I really think that it has to do with, ultimately, what are you doing as a Christian? You're trying to find the truth of the Bible, of your holy book, and there is one truth you were supposed to see within that text for some versions of Christians.
Speaker: And those people take that same viewpoint in studying Tolkien because he is a Christian author and therefore they should be able to find this one truth that they found in the Bible in Tolkien's text. Going back to what we were saying earlier, how are they still studying the fucking Bible if you have to have personal knowledge of who wrote a book to be able to do scholarship on it?
Speaker: It's enraging to me, and it's doubly enraging to me here, someone who has done a peer -reviewed paper, even if it were 15, 20 years ago. I don't know when he actually published it. But you have engaged with the scholarly community. You know that we exist. We may not be doing the kind of scholarship that you feel like should be happening, but right now, Tolkien studies is in a renaissance, and it has been for
Speaker: five to ten years. It picked up a little bit and has just continued growing ever since the movies were released. And the movies exist. Adaptations exist. They bring in new fans. It grows
Speaker: the area of study and you're not always going to be able to force what other people are interested in studying. Like, yeah, you can study what you think Tolkien's authorial intent is from a Christian lens, but that is one way of viewing it. And Tolkien was a man. He wrote books, not holy books, just novels.
Speaker: There is no one true meaning to life in the universe that you can tease out of his fucking books. What you tease out of his books are what you put in there. And other people don't necessarily stuff Tolkien's books full of Christianity because that's not where they are coming from.
Speaker: My god, I get so fucking angry at people who just want to throw out the entirety of the Tolkien Studies field, which is so much bigger now than it even when it was when I first joined it and started going to conferences. And there's like, like I said, there's a renaissance. There's so many people who are presenting on so many interesting readings of these works and like, etymological studies and like, fuck off.
Speaker: fuck off, this is what you want to do. Throw together a real interesting conference. Why? Why do you have to silo yourself out like this and then want to play persecution complex when no one outside of your incredibly limited group of friends want to come to your conference because you're not putting out what people are actually doing?
Speaker: Okay, I'm done. Eight fucking men. And in some ways, listen, when when folks get all grumpy and they want to change the world around them, it's like, well, go go do your own thing, then go go do your own version of that. And that seems to be what they're doing here. So that's fair. That's very fair.
Speaker: peace and joy to them. I don't think that this is one that I'm going to prioritize attending. I don't think so either. Largely because of that positioning of sort of like a persecutorial complex and, you know, sort of death of Tolkien studies being hinted at when there's that's not the reality.
Speaker: And that's just a frustrating thing. I just wanted to kind of highlight that this is happening and put it in stark contrast to what we've been enjoying and learning and attending. And just to kind of highlight that this kind of positioning is out there and it's a minority.
Speaker: And that is exactly the thing that the folks in this perspective are complaining about, that it's not the dominant narrative, it's not the dominance out of opinions. And to that I say there are a lot of excellent conferences that folks can attend and pick up papers from and listen to presentations from that will just let the good stuff keep going.
Speaker: Yeah, I mostly just wanted to kind of highlight that this stuff is happening, and it is a minority position. And I feel like we can leave them behind to wherever they want to. Again, yeah, peace and joy. We'll leave them to do whatever they feel is right and proper, and we'll keep doing the actual work that Tolkien scholarship is up to and doing. So keep highlighting that and promoting it.
Speaker: And speaking of other great conferences that are going to be happening this summer, in early August, the mythopedic society is going to be hosting its online mint summer seminar. And its topic is fantasy goes to hell, and I'm super excited about it. And we are all presenting there, including sometimes Tim. Yeah. Tim.
Speaker: Leah and Grace and our friend Pablo, who is, I don't know if he's friend of the podcast, but he's friends with us. He will become a friend of the podcast. I hope so. I want to be able to tell the floor Pablo story so bad. Well, then yeah, he's going to become a friend to the pod.
Speaker: So you guys are doing a panel on the Rings of Power? Yes. Yeah, we're going to basically be talking about now that the first season has aired, we're going to kind of do a retrospective and compare what Tolkien wrote of the Second Age with what we see in the show. And we're hoping to kind of cover how the writers and showrunners have interpreted
Speaker: certain specific passages and where departures and changes were made for the sake of adaptation. The accurate, the adaptational whole vectors. Yeah, just kind of highlighting themes of the season and things that really resonated with audiences and kind of speculate on where things are going and how potential changes might unfold in seasons to come.
Speaker: I am on a couple of panels and I'm giving a paper because I like to spread myself dead. I am doing a presentation on Underworlds and the Legend of Zelda franchise specifically because I just finished playing Tears of the Kingdom and I can't say anything else about that without giving a bunch of spoilers and the game's still too new. And I'm also on a panel about Underworlds and Tolkien.
Speaker: That is a panel I gave at DragonCon last year, so I've tapped some of my DragonCon buddies and I'm pulling them into the myth sock fold now. Into the clutches. Yeah, I'm hoping I can hook at least some of them into the tentacles. The last panel I am moderating is called Hell is Other People, looking at the political rage machine and Tolkien fan spaces in media. Super excited.
Speaker: Yeah, I've managed to net a fellow Twitter warrior into this panel and I'm pretty excited about it. So the abstract for that one is following the backlash against the Tolkien Society's Tolkien and Diversity Seminar and the airing of the first season of Rings of Power, social media fan spaces for Tolkien remain politically charged and reactionary.
Speaker: Building on the foundation of MythCon51's Roundtable, Race, Racisms, and Tolkien and Craig Pranson's work showcased there and on the podcast American Id, we will discuss the current state of Tolkien discourse on social media and how to navigate the landscape as safely as possible.
Speaker: Yeah, I am very stoked about that. Yeah, I'm hoping it's going to be a little conversational and like, based in academics, you know, kind of like this podcast is, but also give some people some good tips for how to actually navigate specifically Twitter because it's a cesspool. I mean,
Speaker: It's a shit show, especially in the year of our lord, the elongated musk. The musk of Twitter. I really hope so too. I'm really excited about this panel.
Speaker: Yeah, Tim and Grace are going to be on that panel as well. I don't know if we've actually ever said this, but Tim runs our Twitter account for the most part. We all help like post on it, but Tim's the person who actually reads all of our replies and shields us from
Speaker: They're really hateful shit. Or even just post it to us on Discord so we can all laugh at it and or become enraged silently. We just scream about it. Document it for panels like this. Yeah. Put it in the receipts folder for the panels.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm very grateful he does that work for us, but because he does that work, he has a lot more insight into some of the vitriol that gets thrown than like someone like I do. Like I moderate social media spaces, but mostly what I moderate are like Facebook groups and Discord servers. I try to stay off the Twitter as much as possible because ain't nobody got time for that.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm very, very grateful for a straight white man shield on Twitter. It's been invaluable. I frequently, I've adopted this, this phrasing and I frequently say it like allyship is standing close enough to an affected community that you are close enough to be hit by some of the bricks that are being thrown.
Speaker: at them. And that is what Tim does for us in this podcast here of being able to sort through some of the things that would just be particularly awful to encounter on a daily basis and helpful to them so that, you know, the burden on us is all a little bit lighter. Good allyship. Absolutely. And it's something he loves to do.
Speaker: Yeah, looking for us, it's something that he finds fun. Twitter warrior for justice. Yeah, I would find it exhausting. I find what little time I spend in various places just utterly exhausting. So I'm like, I'm glad that you find it fun. I couldn't do it.
Speaker: Yeah. When we took over the Tolkien Tuesday tag, all of us were exhausted except him. Tim was like, this was great. I could do this forever. And Lee and I were like, oh fuck, I never want to see Twitter ever again. I don't ever want to see another tweet.
Speaker: I was also exhausted, but in my defense, I'd been hospitalized the day before. You were excused. You were totally excused. Alicia and I were just introverted out, I think, and content created out, I think. I was like, I'm not meant to generate a million tweets a day, man. I can't. I can't do it.
Speaker: I know we're going to touch on that a little bit later too, and that experience. But one, I think the last thing for OMS is that I am also going to be presenting a paper called Those Queer Devils, and it's about queer coding in fantasy works, and obviously with a focus on Tolkien and his works as well, and looking a lot at the Hays Code and how that impacted cinema and other media
Speaker: as a result for the years that it was running into even still to this day. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm excited about that paper. I love delving into history and kind of discovering and like the Hays Code is a pretty fascinating bit of history and I'm really excited about this.
Speaker: Well, that said, back to Tolkien Trues Day. For anyone who's not familiar, Tolkien Trues Day is a hashtag that is organized around a particular theme related to Tolkien each week.
Speaker: And that can be anything from, you know, like trees or Numenor, what have you, to for the final week of June, leading up to International Pride Day. We did a takeover of the Tolkien Trees Day hashtag and looked at queer readings. So on the 27th of June, that Tuesday, it was a queer lodgings takeover of the Tolkien Trees Day hashtag, which we were all very tired queers by the end of.
Speaker: we were. It was a really good experience for as tired as I was. And I was just like, this is just a lot of creative output for me right now. I think that it was a really, we had some really lovely participation and responses. And I really love that
Speaker: All the threads and the posts that we shared were really fun and interesting and insightful. And it was really fun to see a lot of people respond to a lot of our content, especially. I think the big thread that kind of took off was highlighting Tolkien's relationship with W .H. Auden and something that we highlighted in a previous episode of Tolkien would hate this podcast.
Speaker: It was nice to see people boosting that thread and responding to it and just kind of going like, you see, Tolkien had a gay friend and that really means something. And this is something that's directly counter to the narrative that we have far too often seen on Twitter that we are making an entire podcast series about basically. So.
Speaker: Having so many people whose work I admire and I respect come at us and tell us that we're doing good scholarship is so great. It made me feel very, very good because I
Speaker: Unlike you two, this is my first little baby toe wading into this kind of stuff. So it felt very gratifying that so many people that all of us really love and admire and really respect were giving us a lot of really great feedback and a lot of great praise. And participating themselves and sharing their queer readings either as queer folks or staunch allies and what have you.
Speaker: One of the things that I was absolutely delighted by was that in exactly the same way that the number of people in my life who came out to counter protest the fundamentalist religious hate group that was protesting a
Speaker: Drag Queen Story Hour in my local town that we stood in opposition to these bigoted protesters during Pride Month. In that exact same way, the number of positive contributions to this hashtag on that day vastly, vastly outnumbered the detractors and the more vile sort of things that were thrown.
Speaker: Not that that didn't happen, but we're accustomed to that as queer people and femme presenting people who have an internet presence and move through the world. But it was very gratifying to see just such a vastly overwhelming proportion of people who were open minded and excited to look at queer readings as opposed to detracting from them.
Speaker: Yeah, I was all geared up for it to be worst case scenario. And my God, it was so heartening that it wasn't because like, yeah, what a bummer is it to be a queer person and just be attacked during Pride Month. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, be thrown under the bus for Pride Month, basically. It's like, this is our holy month. How dare you? It took Pat Robinson. It's a good month. This is our joyful. Pride Month is our joyful. We're now in Wrath Month, so we're Wrath Month. Yeah, you're reminding me that the gods of Pride took Pat Robertson in this our holy month. I'm like, ah.
Speaker: Yeah, June's bad for big hits, guys. It's because they have to subsist on off -brand saltines because as they're trying to boycott everything that like even so much as like puts forward a rainbow in Pride Month, you can't even have regular saltines. Nabisco is on board. So, oh well. I wish them all a very bland every single June. Off -brand saltines and water. Go for it.
Speaker: Thank you. Praise be. There's just some timing, you know? I can't ignore that timing.
Speaker: Yeah, but no, in all seriousness, I think also one of the things that I would point out that made that experience like start off on the right foot is that Tim Bolton, who does a lot of the organization for token Tuesday, and is, you know, absolutely worth follow on on Twitter and all that.
Speaker: to get the information for token tuesday it's one of the the bright spots of twitter one of the the only positive experiences that twitter has for me there even though we're always stressed about it we're like oh shit it's monday for days tomorrow when are we posting what are we doing what are we doing
Speaker: Usually our posts kind of sail in sometime at like midnight Eastern and sometimes midnight Pacific. I was going to say we extend to the Pacific time zone. And so as long as it's Tuesday there, we're good. Okay. It's cool.
Speaker: Tim Bolton was very upfront in turning everything over to us to do the takeover that bigoted responses and everything wouldn't be tolerated that we're looking to treat everyone with kindness and respect and dignity and some of that I just want to highlight that sometimes
Speaker: simple actions like that, just upfront actions like that on the part of people who may not be part of the queer community but are willing to stand as allies, taking those stances upfront make a big difference and it helps to keep a lid on things and that's the kind of allyship that we like to see in our online spaces and all that.
Speaker: Yeah, enforcing boundaries and being upfront about them and then following through. It makes a really big difference. And I think that, you know, having those boundaries being watched over made our experience a really, really positive one. And again, yeah, largely free of complete bullshittery and stupidity. Certainly better than I was expecting, which is a nice gift at the end of Pride Month. Absolutely.
Speaker: Given that we're recording this shortly after the United States Supreme Court has released its most
Speaker: recent raft of decisions, many of which are concerning for a lot of marginalized communities, queer folks, folks of color, just all kinds of different concerns there. We always do like to take a moment to celebrate the good things and the sort of wins in society. And I would count the recent release of Magic the Gathering's Lord of the Rings set among those wins.
Speaker: For anyone who's not familiar with Magic Gathering and perhaps hasn't lived with a partner for the past 20 years who is completely obsessed with this game, it is a trading card game sort of in the same vein as your Pokemon and Yu -Gi -Oh! and all of that. It's put out by a company called Wizards of the Coast, which is now owned by Hasbro as its parent corporation.
Speaker: They're also the same company that currently owns D &D and all of that. So they work with a lot of fantasy IP and all of that. They have their own typical fantasy storyline for all of their things. But they've also been more recently putting out some sets that sort of partner with existing fantasy IPs. And the most recent one of those that came out in June was Lord of the Rings set. And I frankly, I think they did a phenomenal
Speaker: job with this. I had a chance to to play in a tournament for this. And I won. We won my partner. Oh, yeah. Lightful. You know, mostly because I was distracting people with with my knowledge of Tolkien lore and to be a complete nerd. It was delightful.
Speaker: But a lot of the flavor of the way these cards are put together, if it's your first time taking a look at the cards or playing, a lot of it's going to look like gobbledygook nonsense, right? But as you start to get into the swing of things, the way that the gameplay goes when you're using these cards has these little moments where you're like, oh, this character, this interaction, this is why they set it up this way. They saw that these things would come together this way. This is really cool.
Speaker: But one of the reasons that I think it's a win is that it's a good product, it's delightful to interact with and play, but it's also a win for social justice because the internet, and by the internet I mean racists on the internet, have been big mad about a few elements of this iteration of
Speaker: like, Adaptational Iteration for a while. A few months back, there was a card that was leaked, and the art and the text on the card were put out on the internet. And the card's name was Aragorn and Arwen Wed. So we're talking about the wedding of Aragorn and Arwen. And it happens to depict a very pale -skinned, dark -haired Arwen character with an Aragorn character.
Speaker: Who is black? And the internet behaved itself very well at that time. As you might expect. It was great and not problematic at all the way that people reacted to this interracial marriage being depicted.
Speaker: where they had previously, of course, really applauded the idea of a man descended from Numenor and an elven maiden. Here, them being depicted with different skin colors was suddenly a racial problem. You surprised me. I've never heard something like this happening on the internet.
Speaker: So we'll put some links to a website called Scryfall in our show notes. And Scryfall is a website where you can see magic gathering cards. You can search them up so you can put in different character names and see how characters were depicted for Lord of the Rings in this and just take a gander through the art. The artwork is beautiful.
Speaker: But I just wanted to highlight a few of these. There are a few excellent cards that I have put in sort of a group chat for us as hosts to look at. Two, some excellent depictions of Aragorn being majestic and kingly and just absolutely wonderful, positive POC representation.
Speaker: year. I apologize to my co -host. I did not include a very important card also, but Gilrain is depicted on one of the cards, Aragorn's mother, and she is a stunningly beautiful black woman as well. Like just beautifully done all the way through just the consistency in working to have more diversity depicted in this set than what has been typical of Tolkien adaptations in the past.
Speaker: Yeah. Their depiction of Galadriel is also interesting to me. It's very storm.
Speaker: Yes, very reminiscent of Storm. You have that very her iconic hair, but she's not depicted as a light skinned white woman. Right. I couldn't honestly tell you what ethnicity they were necessarily going for. It seems like she's sort of got, you know, different ethnic heritage.
Speaker: sort of depicted in this creature and this beautiful fey fairy sort of thing. But she's not depicted as white or light -skinned despite her fairness and her beauty and I love that. There are a couple cards that depict Theoden, King of Rohan,
Speaker: He is the new Middle -earth Zaddy. He looks amazing. Total Zaddy. And then you also have Eowyn, who is, again, you have that pale hair and darker skin and just absolutely beautiful representations of her in her various different roles, including being a fearless knight, a shield maiden, and Lady of Rohan. Love it.
Speaker: I hadn't seen a couple of these Aowin art pieces. Yeah, they're stunning. Aowin is definitely related to Sally Phaedon. I'm like, yes. And Aowin is also a bit different, a bit more nuanced than he's typically depicted in the past as well. I mean, I just love that they're working to open up these interpretations and
Speaker: The internet may be mad about it and by the internet, I still mean racists on the internet. They may be mad about it, but I am delighted. Yeah. And then
Speaker: Gandalf, absolutely phenomenal. We have a dark skinned Gandalf, Gandalf the Grey, Gandalf the White. And honestly, I feel like they almost need to like go pay royalties to Ebony Warrior cosplay because his Gandalf cosplay could have just perfectly, absolutely inspired this depiction of Gandalf, just absolutely.
Speaker: Fantastic. There's also some Black Hobbits depicted. The card in particular that I'm thinking of is called Sardoch, Master of Buckland. And then we have to talk about Goldberry. It's the first card. Oh boy.
Speaker: I understand why Tom Pompitil would be distracted and just put the ring down and forget it. So would I.
Speaker: I get why palm brings her flowers. Yeah. Oh, boy. Hmm. She is gorgeous, gorgeous. Damn thighs, beautiful thighs. One of the things that is absolutely wonderful about this depiction is like we're so accustomed to seeing like really, you know, svelte willowy women who, you know, we're slender and lice and we've golden is thick.
Speaker: She is a big girl. And she is gorgeous. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's absolutely wonderful art and depiction here. She may be my current desktop on my computer.
Speaker: Which I am recording from a different room than usual, and so I am on largely different computers than usual. And I logged into the computer and was like, oh, partner of mine, I appreciate that you have put this picture of Goldberry up as your desktop. And partner of mine was like, that's your computer. I was like, so it is.
Speaker: You don't have to be far from her. Exactly. So just absolutely, absolutely lovely.
Speaker: Yeah, I am almost positive I'm going to end up cosplaying this particular version of Goldberry. I hope this isn't something that really comes up that often. I cosplay one of the great berries from Breath of the Wild. And this particular depiction of Goldberry is giving me mad cotera vibes. And I feel like I could probably pull this off because I also have incredibly thick thighs. I think I can make it work.
Speaker: Yeah, you can absolutely make this work. And I am so excited for when you do. Yeah, I'm so down. I can't wait. I cannot wait. Oh, yeah. One delightful thing that I would also add in about just some of the way that these cards function together and a neat queer reading piece for the Tolkien fans is that there are cards for, you know, all the main characters and you've got
Speaker: Frodo and Sam as the folks among those. And there is a mechanic in this game in which there's a partnership text on each of those cards. And Frodo and Sam partner with each other and get stronger and have better effects when they are partnered together. And we'd love to see it.
Speaker: Yeah. And so the final thing that I wanted to mention about the Lord of the Rings set is they did this interesting shtick for this one. They have a number of different cards that work with the one ring and whatever and they have versions of it that any game store that you're in having a tournament somebody's gonna have a copy of that to work with or whatever it's a
Speaker: It's not a particularly common card in the game, but it's not, you know, unheard of. However, they made some serialized versions of both the rings that are given to the elves and men and dwarves. They made a few thousand copies of each of those, and those are serialized, so you have, you know, one of 700 dwarven rings and whatever, and those are going for a fairly high value.
Speaker: as you're looking at the value of these trading cards. And then they also made a serialized one of one, the one ring.
Speaker: Hell yeah. And this card, it has been found. It was found in Toronto. You have it Alicia? No. The person who found it chose to remain anonymous that they're a 36 year old cashier. So like a sort of like regular person is who found it, which is
Speaker: And it has been authenticated. This card is currently estimated to be worth about $2 million. Holy shit. Wow. Yeah. He got an offer for, was it 2 .8? He's still fielding offers. Yeah. So this is going to be the most valuable card that's ever come out of, you know, this, this trading card game that's been running for, you know, 20 plus years.
Speaker: Previously, the most expensive card in the game was called the Black Lotus. And the most one of those had sold for was Post Malone bought a copy of that card for $800 ,000. Wow. He's a big Magic the Gathering nerd and all that.
Speaker: But this certainly far outstrips that. And it's been really, really interesting watching how people get excited to open packs and see if they can find this card and what it's doing to the whole community as people open a lot of this set and what that means. But it has been found and someone has the one ring. So good for them. Interesting side note about that card.
Speaker: The guy who did all of the Elvish writing for all of those Magic the Gathering cards is a member of the Mythic Society and a friend of mine, more than just me. We have been talking to him about potentially coming on the podcast.
Speaker: Yay. This is just the episode where we tease all the guests that we've been quietly lining up for the last few months. We're like, no, I promise, like, there's some good shit coming. We have lots of friends. So yes, so there's a lot to look forward to from queer lodging. So we have a number of exciting guests who we're working to schedule in and get to have those conversations with and then share them with you.
Speaker: There are amazing conferences coming up that we will report back on as well. There are just all kinds of fun things happening. And we will also be continuing some of our series like our queer reading series and our Tolkien would hate this podcast series. So we'll be adding to those threads going forward as well. So lots to come from us and we look forward to speaking with you soon.
Speaker: Thank you for joining us for another episode. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify. You can also stream our episodes directly on Zencaster, that's Zencaster .com, slash Queer Lodgings the Tolkien podcast with hyphens in between all of those words. Please leave us a rating, like, share, and subscribe. You can find us on Facebook at Facebook .com slash Queer Lodgings on Twitter for right now.
Speaker: at queer underscore lodgings or you can send us an email at queer lodgings podcast at gmail .com and I really need to update this but we also now have a website which is queer lodgings .com where you can find all of our resources for each of our episodes as they get posted and you can listen on there as well. Yay! Thanks guys!
Speaker: I got frozen, I think. Nope. I think Alicia did. Oh, okay. You were Alicia was going to say speaking of, and then I think talk about OMS and I liked that idea, but, uh, Alicia's definitely frozen. Yeah. Oh, is Tim gone too? Oh yeah. Tim, are you there? I think they're both gone. We're finally alone now. What happened to Canada? What happened to Canada? Wait, what's that song?
Speaker: I think we're alone now. We're alone now. What's happening here? Let's see if Tim can see my message.
